Mentor Roles

[hauki]

Thank you everyone who has replied. These comments should be bound and published as a mentor handbook!

Just to be clear, my idea of fail is to not field any sort of robot at a competition. At this point we don't have a moving chassis but are still spending too much brainstorming on how to climb the wall. I keep trying to redirect the team on getting the chassis built. It has just been challenging.

A little backgound. This is the teams 5th year. We are a small team with 4 mentors (1 engineering, 3 business) and 9 students. All this years mentors are new. We have 2 students that have been with the program and the rest are new 9th graders. I really have no idea why the former mentors dropped out but it has left a big gap.

From my conversations and observation of the team I believe the focus in the past has has had too much emphais on getting a robot built at all costs and not enough about team and individual building.

The students lack many of the hard and soft skills needed to get though a build season. If you dump some people into a high pressure situation where they don't have all the technical, analysis, planning, stress management, negotiation, leadership, ownership, etc skills needed, then there are going to be issues. I have come to realize I can't resolve these issues during build season. I can only triage the situation and do my best to keep the team moving forward. Work needs to be done off season to build a team and prepare them for the season.

It is what it is.


"We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not-bickering." Mystery Men